This happens much more often than you might think, I was just saying essentially the same thing in the Ultraviolet Dawn thread yesterday. Technical excellence is not the same thing as "fun". I'm trying to walk that line right now with Spirit Hunter Mineko, and the tons of good ideas/suggestions that people have been posting in that thread are helping immensely. I have a pretty good idea of what makes games like this enjoyable, but despite that I have been surprised by other people's opinions. Lesson learned: don't develop in a vacuum, and be prepared to throw some of your ideas out the window after feedback from gamers A bit of good news, I made a post in my forum this afternoon as well- found some further optimizations that I could make to the mini-map drawing and other screen updates in Rogue Touch. The test version I'm running now looks impressive on iOS4, and will likely be blisteringly fast on older OS versions! I'll probably submit a yet another new update this coming week with my supercharged screen drawing, and a new item or two hidden in there for you
3gs, iso4 non jb. the movement after double tap is sometimes really slow with new and previous version of RT.
So, will RT Ex have a shop in addition to cutsey J-graphics? The perfidious griffin looks deceptively cuddly .
There are several potential causes that can still slow down the gameplay in v1.52. Out of curiosity, do you play zoomed out (50, 75%) or all the way in at 100% size? Zooming out impacts performance for the worse. But even if you don't, the more of the level you explore, the more the mini-map causes lag. I think I have that problem solved completely in v1.53, which is being tested right now Thanks! As you see, there are great things afoot! Rogue Touch EX should be a lot of fun to make, and great to play... That's right! Forgot about Isle of 8Bit Treasures... I did like that one, but it seemed lacking something... That Griffin does seem too cute, but don't let that fool you, he is still extremely dangerous! Some of the other monsters have sweet and innocent faces as well. Shopping in Rogue Touch EX: we should be seeing the appearance of a wandering merchant in this game. A lot of small deviations from Rogue will be made for EX, all in the name of fun
CD, you little devil! First you get me all excited about one upcoming game and then BAM you hit me with a new one to get excited for! Like Isilel said, those monsters do seem a bit cuddly - I bet that nice little dragon would never spew fire at me...
Hmm... I went quite a few pages back to look for that Rogue Touch EX screenshot but couldn't find it, nor can I find a thread for that game... I just wanted to say that I dearly hope that whoever made those sprites also gets to make the UI, because to be absolutely blunt, the UI for the current Rogue Touch is complete amateur hour (or if you wish, "designed by an engineer/coder" which is basically the same thing).
I wouldn't take that bet if I was you, these little guys may be cute but they pack a punch Rogue Touch EX version was just announced on the TouchArcade home page, with only the one teaser pic there. A thread will be added to the upcoming games section once I have more details that I want to share... Since you're bringing it up, what would you do differently for a game that was all ASCII characters, and played via keyboard commands? The point of the Rogue Touch interface was meant to use iPhone standard elements whenever possible, and to be absolutely minimal. Character stats and activity log text easily readable at the top of the screen, only two buttons at the bottom (so your hand never gets in the way), and touch in the direction you'd like to move. I would definitely be willing to take any and all suggestions to heart, anything that makes the game more playable is a win I suspected as much. The CGContextDrawImage call is much slower in iOS4, and the more individual tiles you can see on screen means the more calls to this draw function that need to occur. Each square on of the visible dungeon and each square on the mini-map represent a draw call right now. This large number of repetitive calls = slow! On OS 3.1.3 and below it's much faster as you know. I came up with a clever way to draw the mini-map that dramatically reduces the number of draw calls for it. That combined with playing at 75-100% zoom level the game is actually faster than it ever was. I'm still unable to get totally acceptable performance at 50% or lower zooms, so I will have to disable those levels for now. If an update to iOS 4 restores the speed of CGContextDrawImage I'll go back to supporting all zoom levels from 25% up. So this next update is going to boost speed yet again, and add Retina Display and Fast Task Switching, among other things. It's looking beautiful here. Expect submission in a couple of days
Wait, seriously? On the whole, and while I'm sure there's room for tweaking, the UI has been widely praised for effectively taking the old system, which used practically every key on the keyboard with bonuses of shift and control states for many of them, and reduced it to a much simpler, but still perfectly effective UI suitable for use on a system that has no physical keyboard. Exactly what would your brilliant idea for a streamlined UI be?
So, after almost a week of nonstop playing, and an awful lot of frustration, I finally returned the Amulet to the surface! However, as I hit the ascend button on the stairs on floor one (returning to surface), the game FROZE, and I did not get to see what happens when I win. Ugh! Thankfully, even though the game froze, after I restarted my device my Rogue WAS listed on the highscore board as a Winner. Whew. Is there anyone who has a screenshot of what it looks like when you complete the game? Or a description of what happens? I'd like to see it. Also, aside from the ascend freeze, I've also noticed that the game is very unstable upon startup now (1st Gen ipod touch, Rogue Touch 1.52). Oftentimes I'll see the loading screen with the hourglass, then the game will crash. I'll have to restart my device to get it to load properly. This rarely happened on previous builds. Once it is actually started up, it's been running like a dream. Well done CommanderData. Fantastic experience. Took me way more hours than I care to admit, but I'm really satisfied I was able to complete it.
Ouch, sorry to hear you had some trouble there nafkert. Based on your device (iPod 1st gen) and descriptions of trouble those are the classic symptoms of low memory warnings. When Rogue Touch starts up (where the hourglass shows) it tries to load all the image data required for the dungeon at once. If you have an old unit like 1st Gen iPod and use it for anything else (e-mail, web browsing, other games) the odds go up dramatically of having trouble. A similar thing can happen when you actually win (or lose) the game: It tries to load a new full screen image and a new piece of music for victory or death. If memory is low, boom! Shut down by the OS. As you said, it is smart enough to record the high score data immediately, before loading the victory screen in case there is trouble. I'll do a few tests here today to see if there is any other way the victory screen can fail to load and fix it if necessary. Yours is the first report I have heard on the problem from all the winning characters, but it could be related to 1.5.2 and using the new SDK for compiling it. Either way, congrats on the victory!!!
Low memory warning does make sense. Sometimes I do get that message "from the gods". And thank you very much for making it save the highscore BEFORE the crash. I think my soul would have been crushed otherwise.
You're welcome! And yes, the memory warning "from the gods" you see in game is sometimes a precursor to trouble. If you are lucky, the iPod can free up memory elsewhere to keep you going, if not, boom! Sometimes you don't even get the warning on screen, it happens so fast There absolutely will be an upcoming thread for Rogue Touch EX, sometime soon. I want to have a bit more info and couple of new images ready first. I will also be taking suggestions, and asking people what they would like to see happen in EX. Probably won't start the thread any time this week, have some "day job" stuff going on, and another update to Rogue Touch "classic" to finish too
So, got the Spartan cuirass for the very first time despite playing a lot of RT. Does it rust? Also, does the game have an algorithm that groups scrolls? I have noticed that I almost always have multiple scrolls of a couple of scroll types pro run. It is, of course kinda frustrating that I never get a combination of really good armor and weapons in the same run. Now, for instance, I got elfin mail and the Spartan cuirass, but not a single enchant weapon scroll or already enchanted weapon. It is pretty clear that I won't be able to kill some advanced monsters... My best run, where I actually found the amulet, though died on return, was with banded armor +2 and a katana that I enchanted to +3 to hit. I can't wait for a shop or wandering merchant or something in RT Ex!
A Spartan cuirass can rust if you have not read a protect armor scroll on it, or wear a ring of maintain armor The random item generator is completely random (or as close as the rng "arc4random" can get, which is pretty darn close). Any oddities you see are just due to chance and dumb luck I'm afraid. As you say, a shop or wandering merchant will make a HUGE difference when trying to play RT:EX ---- Other Rogue Touch news: Have squashed a few more rare bugs, and added some new items, and some great iOS 4 / iPhone 4 features. So much has changed I will not be submitting version 1.53, but rather version 1.6 of Rogue Touch! Just a bit more testing, hopefully it will go on to Apple tomorrow
